Sunday, September 27, 2009

Homo Sap? Get wise.

Elsewhere in my bloggery, I have paid tribute to two writers who had a huge influence on my earlier reading career - namely Messrs Wodehouse and Asimov. But more recently ( and by recently, I mean in the last ten or twenty years - when you get to my advanced decrepitude, you count the passage of time in decades...) where was I..? Damn those parentheses ... Oh yeah, more recently, I was saying, I came across the work of one Terry Pratchett.

I confess that I had ignored the books of Pratchett up till then, largely on the basis, and I hope I can be forgiven for this, of their covers. The early books were encased in the artwork of Josh Kirby - a fine artist, and much admired by many, but his style was not attractive to my eyes. I thought the books were juvenile looking, and the garish colours and gnarly, distorted figures did not appeal to my sense of humour or aesthetics.

However, when I was on holidays in Majorca, lo, these many years ago now, I was stuck for something to read. I am a confirmed bibliophile and the prospect of a holiday in the sun without something papery and print-covered struck fear into my heart, so an emergency expedition was launched and I discovered an Oxfam shop in the nearby town. And in that blessed place of trade, I found "Feet of Clay" by one T. Pratchett. Desperation whispered in my ear, saying "go on, give it a go." The only other option that presented itself was a shelf of Mills and Boon and a solitary dust-coated copy of Arthur Hailey's "Hotel". I heeded the voice of desperation.

I never looked back. Once bitten by the Pratchett bug, I was a confirmed addict and embarked on a quest to redeem my previous sin of omission by collecting the complete works. For those of you who haven't read any of those books, I can only say you should also try at the earliest possible opportunity to correct that error.

The background to all of his stories is fantasy - but he has re-invented a great many onventional monsters in his own unique way. Dragons, golems, vampires, witches and wizards are all here, but they all march to a slightly different drum and have acquired an internal logic that is delightfully credible and entertaining. I won't bore you with the details of how he does it, 'coz half the fun of reading his books is waiting to see what he'll do next.

What sold me on Pratchett's writing is the ability the man has to tell a story from start to finish and leave you satisfied that the story has been told as well as it possibly could be told. There are far too many best selling writers who bring you from page to page in a breathless rush of steadily mounting excitement, only to crash through the last few fences ignoring or forgetting seemingly crucial plot points, and leave you wondering what it was all about. Pratchett doesn't do that. His pacing is perfect, and he plots as well as anyone I've read.

He manages in every book to find ways to dodge clichés and avoid repetition of old and hackneyed plotlines. His characters are flawed, but try to do the right thing, and he retains a strong moral core in all his books without being preachy or po-faced about it. The sense of humour that pervades all of his work is very Monty Python in the earlier books, and becomes more subtle as they progress, acquiring darker shades and carrying more gritty social satire in the more recent publications.

I won't go on too much more about this - it starting to sound a tad eulogistic. But the main thing that I like about this guy's writing is the intelligence and cynical common sense he brings to bear on so many societal assumptions. Human vanity is a regular target of his. Whether it's the concept of monarchy, hierarchy, patriotism, bigotry, religion, academia, or just plain self-importance, there's a Pratchett Pin for every foible's bubble.

The conceit I like best is one he has revisited himself several times - the notion of the innate superiority of the Human Race. I'm reading Richard Dawkins at the moment, and he has similar things to say in his own style, and maybe I'll vent my admiration for his work on another day.

Anyhoo, Prattchett questions the impartiality of the anthropologists who assigned the name "Homo Sapiens" to our species. It translates as "man the wise", you know. In fairness, if you look around at our various political and social pillars, how many times could you apply that term to the so-called great and good of our world? I mean, seriously now...?

Pratchett's thesis (which I understand is not unique to him, but I'll call it that) is that we are not exactly God's Last Word - unless God has a really warped sense of humour. That's hardly earth-shattering, I know, but I really like the idea that the whole issue of anthropological taxonomy should be revisited. That's what the bould Terry suggests in one of his books - that the scientific community should sit down and agree collectively to re-label the human race in a more appropriate manner.

Current evolutionary evidence tells us that we are most closely related to the Chimpanzee, or Pan Troglodytes as the boffins would have it. In fact, the general trend of scientific thought seems to indicate that our common ancestor is distressingly close in evolutionary time - distressing if you are a creationist, that is.

The principal thing that distinguishes us fundamentally from Pan Troglodytes is not our computers or our sailboats or rocket ships or racing cars. It's not even our opposable thumb, although there's no denying that it is very handy. (Sorry)

No, what distinguishes us is our linguistic skill - our ability to communicate. We do it all the time, obsessively and compulsively. By computer or television or radio or telephone, by the written or the spoken word, in cinemas and theatres and concert halls, in poetry and in songs and in paintings and in text messages, the biggest part of our lives is given over to sending and receiving explicit and implicit information. And the thing we do with all of these words and ideas and dreams is this - we tell stories.

We are storytellers - every one of us. It's how we make sense of the world. We build an artifice of information into a coherent structure that tells us enough to help us understand or deal with any issue. The story of the creation or of evolution or relativity or of Gilgamesh the King - they are all vessels for information that allow our brains to cope with the world.

That's not to say that all stories are equally valuable - Jeffrey Archer is not William Shakespeare and L. Ron Hubbard is not Einstein. You have to evaluate every story you are told in the light of all the other stories, and hopefully arrive at a sensible, workable set of conclusions.

Be all that as it may, and I'm not going to debate the relative merits of any of the forementioned here, the point is that we tell stories. We are narrators. And the name Pratchett mooted for our species and which I would like to second with all my heart is "Pan Narrans" - the storytelling chimp.

Oook!

1 comment:

  1. Funnily enough, right after I wrote this, I sat down that evening to watch a documentary called Genesis versus Darwin. Chilling stuff. I will re-visit this issue soon. Either that, or I'll put my foot through my TV.

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